Pennsylvania nuns accused of voter fraud could take legal action

Activist’s claim that ‘no one lives’ at the Benedictine Sisters of Erie monastery denounced by sisters

A group of Pennsylvania nuns is considering suing a Republican operative after being accused of voter fraud.
The Benedictine Sisters of Erie have indicated they are preparing to take legal action against Cliff Maloney, the founder of a pro-Republican ground campaign group, after he accused the Catholic monastery of casting illegal votes.
Mr Maloney runs a group called the Pennsylvania Chase, which aims to knock on 500,000 doors across the state to boost the number of Republican voters who return their mail ballots.
He wrote to his 58,000 followers on X earlier this week that one of his group’s 120 workers had “discovered” that 53 people were registered to vote at the monastery but “no one lives there”.
However, the Benedictine Sisters have claimed that 55 nuns live at the monastery full time, and they accused Mr Maloney of publishing a “blatantly false post”.
“To be unjustly accused of voter fraud is just really disgusting, ugly,” Sister Stephanie Schmidt, the prioress of the monastery, told The Washington Post.
“We want to call Cliff Maloney to account for his blatantly false post that accuses our sisters of fraud. We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Sister Schmidt, 72, said in a public statement.
“We also want to alert those who subscribe to X and other social media platforms to be vigilant and seek additional information before accepting these posts as truth.”
Sister Schmidt accused Mr Maloney of “public defamation” and said the monastery was “pursuing legal counsel”.
In response, Mr Maloney told the Washington Post that his members were  “working to confirm” that the nuns do indeed reside at the Erie address he posted.
“If we confirm that, great, I encourage them to vote,” Maloney, 33, told the newspaper. “If we don’t confirm that, we’ll look at the next step to take to make sure that only legal votes are cast.”
The furore over registered voters at the monastery comes amid an atmosphere of heightened fear about electoral interference in the key battleground states.
A network of Republican billionaire donors has given more than $140 million to around 50 groups that aim to address election integrity, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The groups’ tactics reportedly involve analysing voter registration on a mass-scale, attempting to slow down the vote count, swamping local election officials with paperwork and lawsuits and supporting like-minded politicians at a local level.
According to reports, more than 100 lawsuits have been filed across the seven battleground states in the lead up to Nov 5 focused on rooting out alleged voter fraud.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, last week claimed without evidence at a town hall event in Pennsylvania that voting machines could rig the election — an allegation that has previously been debunked.
Sister Schmidt told The Post that “each sister votes her conscience,” but the Erie order itself is nonpartisan and does not take part in any political campaigning.
“We want to be on public record as having called out this fraud so that if the outcome of next month’s election is contested in Pennsylvania our integrity will not be called into question,” she said.
Cliff Maloney and the Benedictine Sisters of Erie were approached for comment.